the journey - GPS trace
We set out from le Conquet on the Monday morning, late, overoptimistic on timings of logistics, leaving before dawn, driving half awake through back lanes, grey light whitening into intricately carved church steeples, car drop-offs by remote beaches where the tide might or might not come all the way back in, snacks snatched at the wheel as the too-early breakfast had long worn off, trailer manoeuvred round cobbled streets where tourists were up already because it was later than it by rights should have been, piles of kit and food on the quayside...all to no avail since as we set out the ebb tide was building, eddy line sharpening at the harbour mouth, forward progress impossible, Isle d'Ouessant impossibly far away.
So instead we crept round the coast, past the Pointe de Corsen, swell cut up into sharp-headed triangular waves and made it as far as Isle Melon, found a suitable landing spot and explored the island for places to pitch tents and mark out our kitchen.
It was quite an unusual place; on the landward side a jagged steep ravine cut into the rock led to a seaweed-filled quarry of uncertain age, empty now at low tide but accessible by boat at high. On the top of the island a dolmen stood silhouetted against the evening sky and a short line of standing stones suggested an alignment or some half remembered ley line. It had a comfortable feeling and I felt naturally drawn to a soft and sheltered patch of grass to pitch my tent, then wandered over to the standing stones, feeling their rough warmth as the day's sunshine radiated gently back from them. At the southern end huge granite boulders mellowed round by millennia of beating waves, against which a gentle swell sucked and crashed. The island was cut up by sharp little gulleys, which made walking round a little hazardous, and innumerable small burrows of rodents.
We settled down in our little paradise, cooked up our dinner, drank some rum punch and watched the sun go down, just like last year. Peace and tranquillity.
Then a different realisation began to dawn: the channels which surrounded us could not have been made by water, the island was too small, they must have been dug by someone. Fortifications. Why? The Germans had built up defences along the whole French coastline in the war. Also then, on our island. Exploring further at the back of the dolmen revealed a rough concrete bunker, carelessly brutalising the ancient structure, unsettling, somehow changing the meaning of everything.
History surrounds you inescapably; the land stays the same and your own imagination chooses which of the coexistent pasts to dwell in. Profanity of German occupation superimposed on the long forgotten Celtic past? But were the Celts gentle and the Germans vicious? Or the other way round? No way of knowing who the German soldiers were who were stationed on our little island. What was sacrificed on the dolmen's table? Did the Germans shoot any ships from there? Does anyone living remember still? The stones and coarse maritime grasses have seen everything, but they tell nothing. Night falls.
The week passed well, Breton weather setting in and moving out again, huge Atlantic swells firing breakers off on the rocky plateau miles off shore forcing us to head straight out to sea. Convivial evenings cooking dinner together, and talking long into the night, huddling one evening way from wind and rain under a big tarp tethered behind a rock, another night in a private campsite, invited by resident caravaners to stop there and leave before the owner came, rewarding them with finest Haitian rum. Paddling sheltered from the wind behind low-lying islands and picking our way cautiously up the coast. A midweek car shuttle which broke the spell for a moment but was soon forgotten.
One night we camped in a coastal reserve, reassured by a local lifeguard that we could stay as long as we kept off the grass and left early. I was awakened, though, at some ungodly hour of darkness by the lights of a vehicle shining straight into my tent. Confused with fear of eviction and arrest and I struggled for minutes to drag on a pair of trousers; by the time I crawled out, found a parked, silent, empty scruffy old car and no-one else awake. I climbed up the sand dune, following thin moonlit tracks in the marram grass, to check on the boats on the beach below, saw from a distance the occupant of the car heading out in a small fishing boat and our boats resting in a line well above the high tide mark, so crawled back in the tent again and went back to sleep. The fisherman came back while we were having breakfast. I went over as he was loading his car and told him what a fright he'd given me, asked about his catch and complimented him on it. But he could only say that there wasn't enough and that things were not as they should be, that it was lucky he didn't have to make a living out of catching fish.
At the end of the week we reached Roscoff, and headed over the narrow channel to isle de Batz for our last night. By some sort of democratic process we ended up on the worst spot on the island; what looked like a rock bank turned out to be a pile of builders' rubble and the put-in the next morning was to involve a a long walk out to the water. We strolled into town (a village of pedestrians and bicycles, from which the day's ferry loads of tourists had retreated without trace) found a sign about seafood for sale, knocked and were told that the responsible person was having a shower. But she was quickly found and soon took us up the road to the shop, a large ground floor room with the older members of the family sitting round the television at one end and tanks of freshly caught crustacea bubbling at the other. It all seemed a bit invasive, so we bought a couple of spider crabs and headed back to our perch on the builders' rubble to boil and dismember them and scrape out the inaccessible little bits of flesh. (Very tasty, but too much fuss as far as I'm concerned).
A short paddle ended the trip the next day, back past the ferry port and into the bay to the west of Roscoff, where we had left the cars, arriving bang on high water and according to plan, only a couple of metres to carry the boats. And nothing left but to have dinner together, indoors, with all the trappings of civilisation, slightly alien after a week out on the sea, living in our parallel reality. A reality demarcated by what you can see from water level, where no hinterland exists above the top of the beach, where all that exists is what you can see, where life is simple, there is no need to engage with the commercial world, where your meetings with other people are somehow more interactive and meaningful than they seem in town, where you land on the beach and leave it again without ever really getting out on to dry land. Visual simplicity, elemental existence. Landscapes outside time, traces of the past interwoven and embedded in the present.
There may be comfort, hot showers and toilets and cars, but returning to the other world is always a disappointment. As we go back, one foot still in the ocean, one back in the world of service stations, hypermarkets, social obligations and offices, we are already planning the next trip.
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